In separate chapters Malcolm considers each of Swift's seven novels, from The Sweet Shop Owner, published in 1980, through The Light of Day, published in 2003. Malcolm explores Swift's presentation of family conflict and emotional and psychological disturbance, his use of complex narrative technique and genre mixture, and his interest in metafictional issues. Malcolm underscores the novelist's debt to earlier writers, most especially George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner, and his recurrent concern with the lives of socially humble characters. Malcolm discusses the novelist's use of major twentieth-century historical events to shape and deform the lives of his characters; his focus on the distortions and evasions that characterize the discussion of personal, local, and national histories; and his fascination with the complexities, sufferings, and joys that mark individual lives. Malcolm suggests that despite Swift's dark vision of human suffering, he tempers his writing with an intermittent focus on that which can redeem our failures, our losses, and our cruelties.